Extenuating Circumstances (15 page)

There was no question in my mind that Raymond had seen Ira Lessing in the Ramrod bar. Whether the story he'd told me was something he'd heard about Ira -or just a composite of the lives of other pathetically damaged men- I didn't know. But I felt as if I'd learned a part of Lessing's history in outline, and it depressed me. Even though I'd half expected it, it depressed me. It was something I didn't want to hear.

I stared across the street at the Deco apartment house -a six-story brownstone wedged between a twostory storefront and a ten-story office building. I'd passed the damn thing a thousand times before. It was one of the few downtown residential apartments that predated urban renewal. But at that moment my curiosity was at low ebb.

Instead of immediately tackling Lester Coates, I ducked into a coffee shop at the corner of Seventh and drank ice tea at the counter, in the bright light of ordinary commerce, amid the soothing banalities of a short-order restaurant full of short-tempered waitresses and sweaty natives. When I felt reasonably normal, I went back out onto Walnut, crossed over to the other side of the street, and walked the half block up to the Deco.
 
 

21

The Deco had a buzzer system outside the lobby door -something I hadn't counted on. That meant I needed to give Coates a reason to let me in, and the best one I could think of, on the spur of the moment, was to tell him I was a cop. I still carried a special deputy's badge from my days on the D.A.'s staff. If Coates didn't examine it too closely, it might work. And if it didn't ... well, I'd be inside by then.

I pressed the button for 425 and a man with an effeminate voice asked, "Who is it?"

I said, "Police, Mr. Coates. We need to ask you a few more questions about the Carnova case."

"Is this really necessary?" the man said irritably.

"Afraid so."

He pressed the buzzer, opening the main door.

I went in. The place had the look of a dead-end hotel -grungy green-and-black tile, peeling plaster walls, bare fluorescent lights overhead. A blue neon sign for the elevator sputtered at the far end of a hall. I walked down to it, past the scarred metal doors to the groundfloor apartments. Someone had put a pottery planter shaped like a toad on the hall radiator. There were no plants inside, just cigarette butts and a few condom wrappers sprouting in the dirt.

Like everything else in the Deco, the elevator looked grim. It was one of those rickety, self-serve jobs with graffiti-covered walls and an empty frame where the safety permit was supposed to be. I got in and pressed four.

While the elevator struggled up to Coates's floor, I read the graffiti. Tommy T's name was etched in one of the walls with the words "The Boss" printed underneath it. Terry Carnova was there, too, inside a heart with Kitty Guinn.

The elevator lurched to a stop on the fourth floor, and I stepped out into a dim hallway with three metal doors opening off it. Apartment 425 was the door farthest from the elevator -the rooms looking out on Walnut at the front of the building. A very fat, very bald man of about forty, wearing a plaid bathrobe, argyle socks, and brown wing-tip shoes, was standing in the open doorway staring at me. He couldn't have been more than five-ten, but his sheer bulk made him look enormous.

"Are you the policeman?" he called out in his squeaky voice.

I took the deputy's badge out of my pocket and walked down to him.

Up close I could see that he wasn't really bald -he'd shaved his head. In fact he seemed to have shaved all his facial hair-eyebrows, eyelashes, beard. It made his fat face look as if it wasn't quite finished, not yet fully human. The tiny blue eyes buried beneath his brow glittered faintly in the hall light.

Through the open door behind him I could see a living room. The furniture -a baize couch and two armchairs- had been beaten to death by the man's bulk. The smell of the room was awful -a greasy odor, mixed with something staler than rotting food.

"You're Lester Coates?"

"Yes. For chrissake, what is it?"

"My name is Stoner." I showed him the badge and he bit his lip. His lips were thick, pink, and sculptedlooking, like soap flowers. "I'm going to have to ask you a few questions."

I edged past him into the living room.

"Questions?" Coates said, scampering up behind me. He must have had taps on the wing tips because his shoes clicked noisily on the linoleum floor. "I've already answered your questions. Why must I do it again? Your Lieutenant Finch seemed content with what I told him several weeks ago."
He'd probably been ecstatic, I said to myself. The last thing Art wanted to do was stumble across another suspect.

I turned around, and Coates hopped away with a pained look, as if I'd stepped on his toe. "We've got some new information we need to check with you."

"About what?"

"About Carnova and a friend of his, Thomas Chard."

"Tommy?" Coates said. "Tommy had nothing to do with it. I've already told you people that. He spent the night with me."

"That's the problem," I said, pretending confusion. "You say he was here all night. But we've got witnesses who'll swear he was with Carnova."

"What witnesses?"

I ignored the question. "We have reliable information that Chard was in the Ramrod up until ten-thirty on the night of the Fourth."

"That's right. And then he came over here."

I shook my head. "He was spotted later that night driving Ira Lessing's BMW -he and Carnova and another boy. All three of them were seen entering your apartment house early Monday morning. Our witness says that both Chard and Carnova had bloodstains on their clothing."

Coates's face reddened. "That's a mistake. Whoever told you that must be mistaken."

I shrugged noncommittally. "I guess we've got a problem, then. Maybe you'd better get dressed, Mr. Coates."

"Dressed?" he said, taking a step back.

"We'll go down to the Justice Center and try to clear this thing up."

The man pursed his florid lips, as if he didn't like the taste of that at all. "I'm not going anywhere with you. This whole thing is ridiculous."

I gave Coates a tough look. "Get your clothes on and let's go."

"I'm not leaving here!" the man said, stamping his feet like a hysterical child. His taps rang on the tile. "You have no right to detain me."

"If you withhold evidence in a murder case, you're an accessory to murder, Mr. Coates. That gives me a right."

"Accessory," he said, staring at me, horrified.

"You could be opening yourself to a lot of charges. Concealing evidence. Conspiracy. Obstruction of justice. Aiding and abetting. Perjury. Homicide."

Coates flinched a little each time I ticked off a charge. When I finished, he dropped his head to his chest.

"Enough," he said in a strangled voice.

Head bent, he walked over to the couch and dropped heavily onto the cushions. He put his hands on his knees and sat there for a second, staring dully at the far wall of his horrible room.

"I can't go to jail," he said, as if that was the one thing that had become clear to him. "I'd die in jail."

I didn't say anything.

The man cleared his throat and looked up at me miserably. "If I talk to you, I won't go to jail?"

"Not if you tell the truth."

"The truth?" Coates echoed, as if the word was new to him. "All right. I'll tell the truth."

I took a notebook and a pencil out of my coat.

Coates cleared his throat again and made a show out of straightening the hem of his robe above his fat white knees. "I . . . I didn't really spend the whole night with Tommy. I was confused before. Shocked by the murder. And then Lieutenant Finch was only interested in Terry."

"I understand," I said.

"Tommy and I are very close, you know," Coates said with a pathetic smile.

"When did Tommy come to your apartment?"

"Around one A.M., I think. It may have been later than that."

"Who was with him?"

"Terry Carnova and another boy, Terry's cousin. I don't know the other boy's name. They were all rather high. And Terry seemed very nervous."

"Did they make any reference to Ira Lessing?"

Coates shook his head decisively. "No. I'd never heard of Lessing before he was murdered. And neither of them mentioned him that night. Tommy said they'd, been in a fight with some blacks on Ninth Street. That's why their clothes were . . . soiled. I offered him a change of clothes -I keep a few of his items in the bedroom. While he was changing, Terry and his cousin left."

"Chard stayed that night?"

Coates nodded.

"What did you do with his bloody clothes?"

Coates put a hand to his brow, shading his eyes from mine. "I washed them out for him, as well as I could. But the stains on the shirt were quite heavy."

"You don't still have these items of clothing, do you?"

Coates didn't say anything for a moment. He just sat there with his hand to his brow.

"Mr. Coates?"

"Tommy took the pants. The shirt . . . he burned the shirt in the incinerator." He sighed so heavily that his whole body shook beneath the robe.

I had the feeling that it was Coates who had burned the shirt, but there was no way to prove it.

"That clothing was evidence in a murder, Mr. Coates. You may have opened yourself to a very serious charge."

The man dropped his hand and looked up at me with a desperate plea in his eyes. "But all I did was help a friend!"

"You aided and abetted a felon. You concealed evidence."

"No!" he said, his voice rising hysterically. "You don't understand. It was false evidence. False! And Tommy is no felon. He didn't do it. Terry did."

"Were you there?"

"Of course not," he said, looking appalled.

"Then how do you know what happened on the night of the Fourth?"

"Because Tommy told me he didn't do it," he said with conviction.

I gave him a hard look. "What did he tell you?"

"I..."

"You can do it here. Or you can do it downtown."

Coates ducked his head tragically.

"He told me Lessing was a friend of Terry's," he said in a defeated voice. "Lessing had picked Terry up in front of the Ramrod that Sunday night. About an hour later Tommy saw Terry driving the BMW on Fourth Street, flagged him down, and got in. Lessing wasn't in the car anymore, but there was blood everywhere. That's how Tommy's clothes got stained. He asked Terry what had happened. And Terry said that he'd killed the man and left his body by the river. Terry was too keyed up to drive, so Tommy took the wheel. They picked up Terry's cousin and came over here. After Terry left, Tommy found the car keys in the living room. He didn't want to leave the car in front of my apartment -it would have incriminated him. So he drove it to the Union Terminal lot early Monday morning and abandoned it there."

The man wiped the sweat from his eyes. "I believe him," he whispered. "That's why I lied."

I didn't know what to believe. It was exactly the opposite of what Kitty Guinn had said and exactly what you'd have expected Chard to say in his own defense. The only thing that seemed clear to me at that moment was that it wouldn't have taken much to set either boy off.

"We'll still want to talk to Chard, Mr. Coates."

"Of course," he said. "Of course you do."

"And we're going to need your testimony regarding the shirt."

Coates cringed. "But I care for Tommy."

"Enough to go to jail for him?"

Coates didn't answer. He didn't have to. I got up from the couch and walked over to the door.
"You think about it, Mr. Coates."
 
 

I could have gone back to the Ramrod -or staked out the Deco on the off chance that Chard would show up. But I'd had enough of Tommy T.'s world for one night. I went home -to the apartment on Ohio downed a couple of scotches, lay down on the living room couch with an ice pack on my head, and tried not to think about the Lessing case.

But I couldn't relax. It was partly the feel of the apartment, still new to me, still too much like rented rooms. The exposed brick walls, the beamed ceiling, the bay window winking in the headlights of the traffic on Ohio. There was no place for my eyes to rest, nothing familiar, nothing with a history to it. My mind kept drifting back to Lessing and those two feral boys.

Who was to say who'd actually done the killing? Carnova or Chard? For all I knew O'Brien was right and Lessing had arranged it himself. Perhaps Ira had become addicted to the ugly, ambivalent thrill, like Raymond the bartender had speculated. Perhaps he himself had pushed one of those two lethal punks to the limit on that hot July night.

I didn't know. I wasn't sure I ever would. But I could no longer kid myself that Ira Lessing had been a straight arrow, victimized purely by chance. He'd picked one or both of those kids up. I'd have been willing to bet that he'd done the same thing many times before -driven by whatever fire was raging inside his own mind and body, by the fire raging inside those two feral boys. And that night he'd been unlucky. That night he'd been consumed.